![]() ![]() NatCon, as this conference is known, has grown into a big-tent gathering for a whole range of people who want to push the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction. ![]() ![]() But this was not Trumpworld, even if many of the people in the room saw Trump as a useful tool. No one cheered or even seemed interested. In this world, almost every word is layered in so much irony that you can never be sure what to take seriously or not, perhaps a semiconscious defense mechanism for people convinced that almost everyone is out to get them.Ī portly guy running for Congress in Georgia made his way to the front of the room to give a speech heavy on MAGA buzzwords and florid expressions of fealty to Donald Trump. “Annie Leibovitz is still scheduling the photo shoot,” she kept saying. I had met Milius outside the Hilton when I asked for a cigarette, and she began to chaperone me around, telling people who eyed my press pass that I was there to profile her as an up-and-coming female director who, she said, had attracted more Amazon streams than any woman ever with her first documentary, a counternarrative about Russiagate. We’re just the last normal people, hanging out at the end of the world.” “Don’t fuck me here,” a dark-haired woman named Amanda Milius said to me-as she somewhat imperiously dealt with a guy at the door who was skeptical about letting a reporter into the party-“and say we’re all in here sacrificing kids to Moloch. These were people who were used to guarding their words. I surreptitiously made a few searches of the name he’d given me and was surprised when I couldn’t find a single plausible hit-though that could have been because he was a hyper-secret crypto type there were some of those floating around. There were jokes, or maybe they were serious questions, about whether one of the guys tagging along with us was a fed. For at least many of the young people, the actual business of conference going seemed to be beside the point, a gesture at how we used to conduct politics back before life in America spun out of control. ![]() It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. ![]()
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